About the release date and PR. Software creation is a very random thing where it is very hard to know beforehand what time will be needed for any part of it. It is my work and i can tell you for sure from past experience that sometimes you feel that a feature will be written/debugged in half hour and it take you 3 days and sometimes you think you will need a week and do it in a single day. And on a big project it is even worse as you have to follow the delay of all your team (and sometimes have to stop and wait for someone else part of the job before being able to restart your part of the job). The only way i ever saw release date that were perfect is to announce a delay that you consider really bigger than the need. "I need around 1 or 2 week for it. Or let's say we release it in one month..." Then after 3 weeks, all is perfect and ready for launch... Either you release it yelling that your rushed things for a great community need, or you wait your official release day and go play Wii while waiting for it. The game i bought and have in my hand right now describe Skyrim and tell NOTHING about the CK. They create the CK as "something else" and even if some people buy Beth games for the modding it is NOT included in the billing of your game. So you can not complain about Beth robbery at all. I enjoyed playing Skyrim for hours and hours with awesome content in it. I know many people had issues in the game but it is hard for me to judge that part of the problem as i had only minor bugs in the game so far, and no big FPS/Gameplay issues (and i am playing on a Laptop that i bought 1.5 Year ago). I enjoyed the great "visual" mods that people made so far without CK. I will be very happy to create Mods and use others Mods with the CK when it release. But i will be happy to wait for it to be released when they finish it and prefer it that way than having some incomplete hard to use tool released early like sometimes you can find on other Games. I have no doubt that when it is finnaly released there will be as many topics about "Lame and bugged CK" and "Beth is crap". It is in the Customers mind to complain even when there is the Perfect Movie/Song/Book/Game out =) Even had several times my own customers telling me "I love the game you made and its features, but as i NEED to trash, i will trash on things that i don't care only because we NEED to tell you that it s not perfect" ... And i can't argue with that :P About the "Loosing time making a CK Teaser when they need to release it" ... Well, it is easy to make a Teaser, someone that isn't currently coding the CK can do it and only ask a coder for two minutes of interview to make it nice without slowing the CK Coding at all. That teaser is made to show the work done so far, but will be used as well even after release of CK to talk about it. They release it tomorrow ? Good. They release it next week? Good as well as i am able to wait for a good product rather than use a broken/not finished one that will waste my time only to try it some days earlier. EDIT: Wanted to add about the "paying on Steam" thing that IMHO that is not an issue and will never be. Even if they made non-free content on it or allow Modders to ask money on it (and i really doubt they would do that at all) IT s not gonna work, as you can still use external modding like nexus with the game. And that mean that for any paying content that someone create, there will be a free clone of it made by people of the community that like to share without the money part of it. The only way for Steamshop paid content will be the common DLC thing that isn t really modding but more of a "expansion" thing. If they wanted non-free Modding they would change the structure of the game files to forbid easy file edition.
